


Ohana Means Family

by LinguisticJubilee



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Dear god so much fluff, F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-08
Updated: 2016-01-08
Packaged: 2018-05-12 16:01:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5671831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LinguisticJubilee/pseuds/LinguisticJubilee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i> “No way!” She grins. “That’s my family name! I’m Rey, Rey Finn!” </i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p> </p><p>In which Finn and Rey were too busy living through childhood trauma to understand what "soulmate" means.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ohana Means Family

**Author's Note:**

> All my love, as ever, to Nia. The idea for the title came from her.

After they run through a Jakku trading camp, steal a ship, shoot down TIE fighters, and scream in each other’s ears, the girl finally calms down enough to turn to Finn and say, “I don’t know your name.”

“Er, Finn,” he says.

“No way!” She grins. “That’s my family name! I’m Rey, Rey Finn!”  

“Oh. Uh...cool? Because that’s my name. My name is Finn,” Finn says, trying to act the way a person who knows a lot about names would act.  “Nice to meet you, Rey.”

She grins at him and turns back to BB-8. The coincidence is forgotten.

***

“Do you know who you are?” Luke Skywalker asks her, as they sit down at a wooden table in his small hut on the island planet. His voice is low and his words are solemn, and Rey can’t help but feel a tingle of suspense.

She nods solemnly. “My name is Rey Finn.”

Luke opens his mouth, then closes it.  “No,” he says. “No it is not.”

Rey blinks at him. “Uh, yes? Yes it is? My first name is Rey and my last name is Finn.”

Luke looks at her, confused. “Your last name is not Finn. Who taught you that it was?”

“Finn is my family name.” She lifts her left arm and unwraps the bandage around her forearm, exposing the word _Finn_ inked into her arm. “See?”

“No, that’s — Rey, that’s not what that means. Your tattoo is not a marker of your surname.”

“But I asked Irdaga on Jakku what it meant when I got it, and she said—” Rey barks twice and blows a raspberry, the Ugnaught word for _family_.

“Ah.” Luke nods his head.  “A translation error.”

“Excuse me?” Rey says hotly. “My Ugnaught is perfect.”

“Not your error, Rey,” Luke says quickly. “The Ugnaught have a different concept of the soul than humans do.  They have no word for ‘soulmate.’”

Rey crinkles her nose.  “What’s a soulmate?”

At this, Luke stops.  “It’s a, well. Hmm. A soulmate is a person who loves you. True love. They did have stories of true love on Jakku, right?”

Once two scavenger women ran away with each other and a year’s worth of Unkar Plutt’s rations.  “Yeah,” Rey smiles, “there were stories of true love.”

Luke grins.  “Soulmates are your true love. They’re like...a planet and its moons.  Forever circling each other, fates intertwined.  Without its planet, the moon would fall into a star.  Without its moon, the planet would have no light in the darkness.”  

Rey laughs softly. “Soulmate,” she says. “I like that word.”

“As do I,” Luke says. “So yes, Finn is a sort of family, but not your surname. Finn is the name of your soulmate.”

Rey’s eyes bulge. She looks down at her wrist, then at Luke, then back at her wrist. “Finn is my soulmate?” she cries.

“Yes?”

“My friend Finn?”

Luke winces. “Presumably? There may be other Finns in your path, I do not know.”

“My best friend Finn? Cute, saved-my-life Finn? THAT FINN?” Luke merely closed his eyes and bowed his head over his clasped hands.  “What...what are you doing?”

“I am seeking out the spirit of my old master, who still lives on in the Force,” Luke said, his eyes still closed. “I am begging his forgiveness for when I was an impertinent teenager. I now know how he felt.”

After a moment, Rey also closes her eyes.  She needs all the help she can get.

***

Finn isn’t allowed to do manual labor yet, so he’s just watching as Poe and the rest of the pilot crew are working on the repairs of their engines.  It’s a warm day, so most everybody has stripped down to t-shirts or tank tops. 

“Pass me that wrench, will you, Finn?” Jessika asks, standing on the nose of her X-Wing.

As he hands it to her, he notices a word written in black on her wrist. “What’s a Sharon?” He asks her.

She grins. "She's a Sharon," she says, pointing with her wrench at a dark-skinned woman standing with Snap. 

“Why is her name written on your wrist?”

Jessika shrugs. “She’s my soulmate.”

Finn feels the familiar pang of frustration he gets whenever he’s confronting new things.  “What’s a soulmate?”

Jessika’s eyes get wide. “POE!” She yells across the airyard. “HELP!”

Poe sets down his tools by his X-Wing and sprints over. “What’s wrong? Jessika?”

She points at Finn. “Feelings. Fix.”  

Finn turns to Poe. “What’s a soulmate?”

Poe sighs. “Fuck, Jess, I thought somebody was bleeding.” He claps Finn on the shoulder.  “Let’s take a walk.”

They start down a windy path that leads to a lake about a mile from the base.  “So you want to know about soulmates, huh?” Poe says.

“Yeah.”

“Do you have a tattoo?”

“A what?” Finn hates this part, the part where he feels dumb at the beginning of every conversation.

“Do you have a soulmate tattoo? Someone’s name written on your forearm?”

“Uh, no.”

“Hey, that’s okay.” Poe nudges his shoulder with Finn’s. “I don’t either.”

“Really?” Finn looks at Poe.  “What is a soulmate, anyway?”

“My mom had this story.  We’re all of us born with a soul.  Some of us have our souls whole and intact inside our bodies.  But some of us, before we’re born, our soul splinters off, and small pieces of it hide themselves inside the body of another person, or multiple people.  Some people get really sad when they don’t find their soulmate.  They think that they’re missing something important.  What they don’t realize, is this entire time, they’re carrying around a little sliver of someone else. Something important was inside them the whole time.”

Finn smiles, and they walk for a bit in silence.  “Hey, Poe?” He says after a while. “Do you want to have a tattoo?”

Poe shakes his head.  “Why would I? I’ve got my team. I’ve got the Resistance,  Now I’ve got you.” He nudges his shoulder with Finn’s again.  “I’ve got every piece of me right here. Why would I go looking somewhere else?”

Finn smiles, but only for a moment.  Maybe that’s what Finn is, an unsplintered soul. But if that’s true, then why does he feel so ragged? “When I was sixteen,” he says, the memory hitting him like ice down his spine, “medical told me I had a rash and they put my arm into a machine that burned so badly I thought I was going to die.” He looks at Poe.  “Do you think that was my tattoo?”

Poe just looks at him, his eyes sad.  “Shit, buddy,” he says, and hugs Finn tightly. 

***

Rey drags a reluctant Luke Skywalker all the way back to the charted part of the galaxy to meet with his sister. When they step off the Millenium Falcon, the crowd gathered cheers, and Luke looks like he would rather be anywhere else but here.

“Rey!” She hears a shout, and Finn is bursting through the crowd and gathering her up in one of those tight hugs he’s so good at giving.

She laugh and pulls away.  “Aren’t you supposed to be in bed still?”

He flashes her a wide grin. “Nothing can keep me down!” He grabs her for another hug, this time spinning her around.

Rey waits until he sets her down, and then says, “Hey, Finn? Can we go talk someplace? You know, before all this—”  she gestures to Luke and the General and the crowd “-—gets so crazy we can’t?”

“Yeah, sure, of course,” Finn says, looking concerned.

They walk out into the woods far enough to hide from prying eyes and ears.  “So,” she says, unwinding the wrap on her forearm with shaky hands, “remember how I told you my last name was Finn? Well, it’s not, because it turns out that—”

“Oh my god, did you find out who your family was?” Finn blurts out, grinning. “Oh, Rey, that’s so cool, how? Did Luke know them? Was it the Force? Did—”

“Yes, okay, I know that now and I really want to talk all about it because _holy shit_ but do not distract me. I have to say this, Finn is not my last name.  And Finn is not my last name because... Um... Well...” Rey bites her lip and shows him her arm, _Finn_ shiny and stark against her pale skin.

Finn stares at her arm, then back at her face, then back at her arm.

“Do you know what this means? Because I didn’t, Luke had to tell me, which was apparently extremely embarrassing for him , but it makes so much sense because I thought about you all the time while I was gone, and all I wanted to do was talk to you and listen to you laugh and —”

Finn kisses her, and yeah, that’s a much better way of handling the situation.

***

Months later, Finn wakes up in the middle of the night to a satisfying warmth on his skin, the feeling an annoying itch that has finally been scratched.  He looks at his arm.  In the moonlight filtering in through the window, he can barely make out the glossy black letters etched along his veins.  “Hey, Rey,” he whispers.

Rey rolls over. “What?” She says, keeping her eyes closed.

“My family name came in,” he whispers back. “My last name is Rey.  Who knew? Finn Rey.” 

“Shut up,” she groans, and smooshes his face with her palm until he leans over and kisses her.

 

**Author's Note:**

> TRUE STORY: 
> 
> I came up with the plot of this at like 2 a.m., tired out of my mind but unable to sleep because of jet lag, and I was sitting around wondering about what the rules of soulmates would be in the Star Wars universe and if other species would have soulmate marks, when unbidden from the darkness, a voice cried out to my mind, MEESA LUV SOULMATE, and then I screamed for seven years. 
> 
> and that's why only humans have soulmate marks in this fic.
> 
> COME HANG OUT WITH ME AND SCREAM ABOUT FINN ON [TUMBLR](http://linguisticjubilee.tumblr.com)!!!!


End file.
